What excites you most about ministry these days? What’s been the hardest thing?

It’s hard to face the reality that what used to work doesn’t work anymore. First Church shares the classic mainline story: it was a large congregation in the 1950s and ’60s, and it lost members from the ’70s onward. Now it is a far smaller congregation trying to figure out how to do ministry in this day and age.

Over the last year, several members of our congregation worked to get our archives digitized. Looking at all the old church bulletins from the 1950s, you realize that there were hundreds of people taking part in Sunday school—hundreds. When you have only a handful of folks in Sunday school these days, it can be really easy to think you’re a failure.

I have to keep reminding myself that the past is the past, and we have to learn how to be church now.